Dead Men's s Boots

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"‘Barnard was on the floor,’ Jan said, frowning slightly as though she was quoting from memory. ‘He’d fallen off the bed, and he’d brought the sheets and the coverlet with him. He was all tangled up in them so you could only see him from the waist up. His head had been smashed into pulp.’

The desk clerk started screaming, which brought people running from the other rooms. Most of them took one look at the devastation and fled. None had come forward since. It was the cleaner who called the police, explaining in heavily accented English that there’d been an accident of some kind and a man was dead.

The cops dismissed the accident hypothesis as soon as they walked in the door. Barnard had been hit more than two dozen times with something hard and heavy, wielded with frenzied energy. Other things – crueller and sicker things – had been done to him too, presumably before that. He’d died on his stomach, crawling across the floor away from the bed, trying to make it to the door.

As far as the damage to his skull went, there were two different kinds of wound.

Some of them had been made with something blunt and round-ended: some were narrower and had penetrated right through the bone instead of impacting on it. Pre-empting the forensics team who arrived later, one of the uniformed constables – the only one with the stomach to get close enough to see – immediately and confidently predicted that when the implement used on Mister Barnard was found, it would turn out to have been a claw hammer.

‘Was he right?’ I asked.

Jan halted in her recitation, which had assumed a deadpan, running-on-automatic quality. ‘They haven’t found it yet,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘If the weapon was a hammer,’ I said, picking my words carefully, ‘I guess you’re talking about a certain degree of premeditation. It couldn’t have been a . . . crime of passion, a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. The killer brought the weapon in with him.’

I was aware that I’d used the male pronoun, not the female.

But unless I’d miscounted somewhere, there wasn’t a woman in the case yet. In C cahe fact, if memory served-

‘You mentioned sexual assault,’ I said. ‘Sexual assault and murder.’

Jan nodded. ‘This man – Barnard – he’d had what they call “receptive anal sex”. And it had been rough.’

‘Rough enough to have been non-consensual?’

‘Rough enough to raise a doubt. There was . . . damage.’

It was time for the make-or-break question.